University of Oxford & RFEL sign contract for SKA project

The aim of the first phase of the study was to design a channeliser for subdividing the radio spectrum which had a maximum performance and minimum complexity. This is as important as producing colour images from an optical telescope. To further boost performance and minimise resource usage, RFEL is now investigating whether their beam forming IP can be combined with the channeliser. The study is critical because the telescope is projected to have 250,000 antennas and the anticipated processing resources and power budget required is a limiting factor for practical deployment. However, it is vital that these optimisations do not result in a loss of gain, or the introduction of processing artefacts that could be misinterpreted as real signals.

To ensure that all available processing resources and data bandwidth are used to maximum effect, RFEL is also considering using it's ChannelCore Flex architecture. This will arbitrarily define the centre frequency, bandwidth and sample rate of potentially thousands of independent radio channels. Without compromising overall system performance, RFEL utilises signal processing architectures and VHDL coding to enable complex designs to fit into smaller, less expensive and more power efficient FPGAs.

Alex Kuhrt, CEO, RFEL, added, "We are delighted to be able to continue working on this international project in such a key role. The SKA, which will be built over the next decade by collaboration between over 100 organisations from 20 countries, will be comprised of thousands of dish telescopes and hundreds of thousands of dipole antennas. Each of the dipole antennas will have two of these channelisers, one for each polarisation, to process the signals. It is therefore vital to keep the power requirement and cost of each processing card to a minimum, which is our speciality."